Sustainable Sales Growth for Food Service Distribution

Guest: Dr. Ellie Daher, consultant on food service and food distribution organizational transformation.

The three or four first questions
The most common calls received are: how do I increase my sales, my sales are lagging, my growth isn’t structured, or how do I make it sustainable. Digging into root causes reveals five key elements that need to be addressed.

1. Vision and mission clarity
Many organizations aim to be “dominant” or the “preferred partner,” but that’s often too broad. You need to define dominant in what — fine food, QSR, coffee shops — because that shapes how you restructure the organization, match channels to products, and set the language for your sales team, since different channels require different acumen and competencies.

Phase one: understanding your existing house
Analyze current customers — how they’re distributed, commonalities, differences, and where the 80/20 rule shows up (typically 80% of revenue from 20% of customers or SKUs). This deep analysis shapes a market strategy to increase footprint with existing customers through segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

The efficiency problem
Salespeople often cover journeys of 150km across multiple channels (coffee shops, restaurants, gas stations) selling many different SKUs. A more focused geography and channel — say, only fast food within a small area with 500 restaurants — creates far greater selling efficiency and productivity than a wide, unfocused route.

2. Organizational culture issues
Companies start with an ideal collaborative culture, but as processes, supervisors, HR, finance, and supply chain get layered in, the culture can skew toward a defensive one — people blaming each other when products aren’t delivered on time or forecasts are wrong, eroding trust between functions.

The silent killer
Like an iceberg, the visible tip is what you see (resignations, unhappiness, people doing the bare minimum), but the real issues are buried — people feeling their opinions don’t matter, avoiding decisions, waiting for someone else to act.

Recruiting process gaps
If it takes 30 days to find a salesperson, 30 to onboard, and 30 to get them productive, that’s three months of lost sales production — a hidden cost of a rigid recruiting process. High turnover also raises questions: are you paying competitively, and are you benchmarking against food service rather than incorrectly against retail pay scales?

Beyond compensation: belonging
People aren’t just attracted to money — sense of belonging, family, and collaborative leadership matter. Where trust is lacking between organization and employee, people show up just to collect a salary rather than feeling the company is their “second home.”

Sales leaders who aren’t people managers
A common gap: managers of a direct sales force were often good salespeople promoted into management, without people-management skills — a role completely outside their comfort zone.

The compensation math
Example: a salesperson earning 10,000/month delivers around 1 million in sales at a 25% margin (250,000 gross). Increasing their salary by 20% (to 12,000) to place them competitively and motivate them could increase output by 20% (to 1.2 million), yielding an additional 50,000 gross — a strong ROI for just 2,000 more in salary. Organizations often stay “blocked” in this kind of thinking, missing this simple math.

Retail food vs. food service mindset
Food service requires a completely different mind and skill set from retail — segmentation, targeting, positioning, understanding customer menus, product functionality, and the impact of an item on a menu (more customers, higher average spend, increased frequency), rather than competing on price.

Consultative selling, not “dumping the truck”
You want to be the partner of choice, not just deliver goods — the “Sales Result Formula” is that every operator cares about getting more customers, improving average spend, and increasing frequency, achieved through insight-led, innovation-driven conversations rather than pure product pitches.

An ideation exercise
Sales professionals were put through design-thinking-style ideation — given an object like a spoon and asked what else it could be used for, then walked through four steps: observation/empathy (studying a picture of a restaurant and its customers), then generating ideas from those observations. One outcome: noticing families with young kids but no kids’ menu or play area, leading to solution ideas beyond just product — a consultative approach that inspires the operator rather than just pushing goods.

Technology reshaping distribution
New platforms allow operators to place orders directly, sometimes with more accurate outlet identification than traditional distributors — distributors need to rethink how sales teams are redirected for maximum reach and productivity.

The “infinite money” thought experiment
If money were no object and you could hire 50 salespeople, where would you place them for the highest efficiency and productivity? Answering this requires defining exactly where you want to be dominant, understanding market segmentation and growth areas (e.g., a reported 40% hotel growth affecting luxury restaurant demand), and having the market analyst insight to know where to focus.

Matrix selling
Selling into specific channels (coffee shops, fine dining) requires both a vertical (technical/product language, e.g., barista or chef knowledge) and a horizontal (sales skills to open, manage, and close opportunities) — a chef may be a great technician but not a good salesperson, and vice versa, so training needs to bridge both.

The PICS formula
Sales teams need Product knowledge, Industry knowledge, and Competitive knowledge, built alongside sales knowledge — a continuous training approach that bridges the retail-to-food-service mindset shift.

Unlearn to relearn
Borrowing from Elon Musk’s approach: unlearning old assumptions built over 20 years in an industry is necessary to bring in fresh ideas, involve the team in brainstorming, and become an agile organization on the path to genuine market dominance.

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